I apparently just now figured out how manual staff visibility overrides work in Dorico in that when a staff is manually hidden at a given system, that functions as an override from that point forward regardless of whether that staff has music later. Although the documentation clearly calls this out, I find this to be a very dangerous configuration option as it can allow users who don’t understand this nuance to effectively suppress a staff for the rest of a piece and not know it. This is what just happened to me and after spending hours getting the casting off to look ideal, I realized my error in that I didn’t perform a “reset” and so had to introduce staves back into a full score.
I looked for an option to change this behavior by default but didn’t find one. I never, ever, ever want to hide a staff in one system and have that continue to be hidden even when there are bars with music. I honestly wonder what the valid use cases are where this is the desired result. Did I miss anything or is there no option which can govern how this behavior works under the hood?
A staff visibility change is in effect until the next change – like tempos, key sigs, time sigs, dynamics, note spacing changes, bracket changes, etc. I don’t believe there is any way to configure how this works.
I agree, an additional hide while empty option would be pretty useful.
My current “workaround” is first to insert a Reset visibility change in the bar where I want to show the staff again and then I apply the Hide change.
Or you think the other way round: Hide all staves automatically in Layout Options, apply a visibility change to show all staves at the beginning of the piece and insert Reset changes where you want to hide staves.
What I think would be really helpful is a toggle within layout options where you set how the visibility overrides function: Manual hiding persists when system contains music: Yes | No
I understand what you’re asking for and (sort of) why you want it, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to allow this kind of change to work differently from all the other kinds of changes.
this is materially different from all other kinds of changes in that hiding staves with content is almost like missing data.
I’m advocating for a user-configurable option, as the post title says, to influence this at the layout level so that this behavior can be modified.
I’ll also point out (although I know this will probably be taken) that how Dorico behaves here is different from how Finale behaves in that hidden staves will never be hidden if there is content in a given system.
I get what you’re saying – all I’m saying is that I disagree, FWIW. I would prefer something more along the lines of what @Vadian suggested, an additional toggle in the manual visibility dialog so that you can force hide, force show, reset to default option, or hide while empty.
Hide empty staves meets your general requirement. And manual staff visibility provides the override (where you wish to show empty staves that would otherwise be hidden). If you do need to apply an override, presumably you will apply a reset when you discover empty staves later that you wish to hide.
This is a dangerous presumption to make; the user will not know to apply a reset for this staff unless they figure out that said staff is hidden even when it contains music. In a large orchestral score and in particularly dense texture, this may either never be discovered or discovered far too late.
Then I think our expectations as users differ. I’m sure part of this is due to my previous history as a Finale user. If I clicked a toggle that says “Hide”, I would not expect this to persist when that staff has music. Put another way: why would anyone want to hide a section of a staff in a given layout that has music?
Not at all. By applying the hide empty staves layout option the user has already decided that empty stave should be hidden and staves with music should show. Furthermore they have decided whether to apply that to all players, or just to specific players.
If they later wish to override that they will have to apply manual visibility (to show the empty bars), so presumably they also know how to reset that back to global option.
My approach is to hide empty staves only when doing so allows me to fit multiple systems on a page. So after setting the Layout Option to hide empty staves, I first identify all places where I can fit multiple systems on a page, I then enclose those systems with system breaks: the first set to Reset All, the second left empty.
Once that is done, I return to the first bar and add a system break set to Show All. I then go through the score and paste that system break (in Write mode) into all the empty ones I created.
Except this isn’t how it always works in Dorico as I have found. When you’re in condensed mode, even with this option selected, Dorico will still produce some systems which contain empty staves. It isn’t entirely clear what combination of events will give rise to this situation. Therefore, the only way to hide these empty staves is to manually override visibility with the “Hide” option.
This discussion is about how that works (particularly the hide function) when later staves have content or not.
I would prefer something more along the lines of what